For that other, much colder part of the United States this is the week the 2016 Champions Tour tees off. Around here it is becoming known as the week the seniors drop the hammer on Hualalai.

Their Tournament of Champions, better known as the Mitsubishi Electric Championship at Hualalai, starts today on the island of Hawaii. At the end of Saturday’s final round, there is little doubt the winner will be far under par.

This is the 20th year Hualalai has hosted the TOC. Eight of the past 10 it has been the easiest course on tour. The other two years it was second easiest.

Which makes it a great place for Peter Jacobsen to begin. He is obligated to work 16 tournaments a year as an NBC Golf analyst. He plays the Champions Tour every chance he gets beyond that and averages about 12 starts a year.

He hasn’t won since his first two years on the tour (2004 and 2005) and was one of 10 sponsor exemptions this week. The tournament, which has a field of 43, is open to champions from the past two seasons and major winners since 2011. There are nine Hall of Famers playing.

Jacobsen, whose most memorable victory might have come against Kevin Costner in the movie “Tin Cup,” couldn’t be happier about starting his year in the Happiest Place on Senior Golf Earth.

“It’s a wonderful thing, especially the first tournament of the year,” he says. “You get the opportunity to get your confidence going, play a golf course that’s fun and it’s a really interesting golf course.”

It also offers a view to die for and conditions so ridiculously nice the pros are astonished to find a divot.

The past two weeks Jacobsen has been broadcasting from Kapalua’s Plantation Course (Hyundai TOC) and Waialae Country Club (Sony Open in Hawaii). He watched 20-somethings Justin Spieth, Jason Day, Rickie Fowler, Kevin Kisner and Zac Blair impose their will on a game that desperately needs a youthful shot in the arm.

Who knows where actually playing golf might fall on Jacobsen’s priority list as he closes in on his 62nd birthday. He is one of the game’s most thoughtful and humorous analysts, a popular course designer and president and CEO of PJ Sports, a sports and entertainment marketing firm.

Jacobsen also unabashedly admits he is an entertainer. That goes far beyond Jake Trout and the Flounders, a band he formed with fellow PGA Tour pros Mark Lye and the late Payne Stewart. To him, professional golf is entertainment “competing for discretionary dollars, like watching movies and ice skating.”

He is happy to see how warmly the next generation of stars embraces that theory. The guys on the Champions Tour have never shied away from it.

“There will always be the competitive aspect of the tour,” Jacobsen says, “and the nostalgia aspect on the Champions — players you have known and watched over the years. But there is also the entertainment aspect. We are entertainers. … It’s great that people love golf and watch us play.”

Jacobsen tees off first this morning at 9:40, playing solo with his son-in-law along as a marker. Hale Irwin, who has won $4.4 million in Hawaii, will make his record 21st consecutive TOC start at noon.

The last tee time, at 1:10 p.m., features defending champion Miguel Angel Jimenez and two-time champ Bernhard Langer, the 2015 Player of the Year. It will be Langer’s first tournament since golf banned the use of anchoring the putter against the torso. He has used a belly putter for 18 years.

“I’m curious to see how that affects every golfer in the world, and the best guy on our tour anchors the putter,” Jacobsen says. “First, I think it’s a silly rule. If it was such an advantage everybody would do it. I’ve never done it, but it will have an impact on some people.”

John Daly will make his Champions debut in May. He turns 50 April 28.